The Other Clouds; beyond the big three
From time to time I come across cloud type of offerings from vendors I had not realised were offering cloud services. These often look interesting but it can be hard to quickly evaluate the offering in comparison to the big three cloud providers. The big three being AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Gartner has made our job easier by analysing the six main offerings and created their famous Magic Quadrant placing IBM, Oracle and AliBaba so far behind the big three that there is little need to consider them for general Cloud purposes. If you have an account with Gartner you can find the report here, for the rest of us have a look at AWS’s article on the 2019 findings:
However, there are still additional Niche players in the market offering services or price points that the more mature platforms wont offer. Some of these are worth looking at while others seem to be just maintaining old equipment.
Compute
Before Cloud became a thing many companies offered “hosting”. This was in effect a server in a data center with VMware or similar installed to provide multiple servers on a single host. Companies would then rent space on one of the servers or a full dedicated server. The server would then be available to the company to operate. This is now talked about as Compute and Storage in the Cloud world.
Many “hosting providers” still exist but their business model is not as viable as it once was. However, offering Cloud “Computing” is still a relevant service offering and can be a better choice in many cases than using the big Cloud providers.
Hitachi Vantara
Previously called Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi is offering a “modern data center” for enterprise customers. Looking at their website it looks like they are catering for VMware based traditional data center operations with a managed infrastructure. They use a lot of terms in their product offering that don’t quite fit today’s cloud world, such as “modern” and “object storage”.
Hitachi appear to have a niche amongst corporate enterprise customers looking for hosted infrastructure and specialised ETL/Analytics and video storage products called Pentaho and Lumata.
Not so much a cloud service as a managed hosting service and specialised software product provider.
Digital Ocean
Rather than become stale or pull out of the race Digital Ocean are taking the Cloud Giants head on re-positioning their service offering to be in line with the Cloud offerings we expect today. They even have their own concept of “Droplets” under their Compute offering which can be compared to the EC2 of AWS.
Digital Ocean has 8 data centres and their product and service offering is significantly less than the big three but they are focused on competing on price and offer markedly cheaper services. See below for a reference graph provided by Digital Ocean:
Kamatera
VPS hosting across 13 data centres across the globe starting at US $4 per month for a Linux server. This is a traditional hosting service that is transitioning to compete in a cloud world. They offer things such as a load balancer and CDN which does lift their offering.
Cloudways
Cloudways are also a VPS type of hosted service but they offer specialist packages to tailor their offering to a niche market. Cloudways has 1-click offerings for things like PHP servers and even Wordpress and Magento.
Rackspace
https://www.rackspace.com/cloud
Rackspace were the market leader of premium hosted services. Today they still operated their data centres and offer “Bare-Bone” managed servers. However, rather than compete as a cloud provider Rackspace have positioned them selves as a premium Managed Cloud service partners. Today you can engage Rackspace to help you design and implement your Cloud solutions in AWS and Azure.
Storage
A different area area of focus in the Cloud Service space is Storage. Many providers have honed in on the need to store data and offer services and solutions specifically for this niche. The big three cloud providers have a range of options for storage depending on the purpose but there is still room for specialised offerings and price point competition.
pCloud
pCloud offers price competitive storage for individuals and small businesses. At the price of about US $100 annually for 2TB of storage pCloud is certainly cheaper than the US $552 that AWS will charge for the same amount of standard S3 storage. pCloud also has a “lifetime” subscription offer which will cost you a one off $350 payment to store 2TB for as long as they stay in business.
The service comes with an app that you install on your computer and mobile devices from where you manage your document. pCloud has an interesting encryption option that you pay extra for. The normal product offering comes with secure endpoints but file level encryption will be up to you.
Degoo
Another low price point cloud storage competitor, Degoo offers 10TB storage for about $120 per year. Degoo focuses on your photos and offers cloud AI features relevant to your photo library.
Dropbox
Dropbox was the cloud storage disruptor who filled a gap between Peer to Peer sharing applications and operating systems like Windows and MacOS. We now have OneDrive, iCloud and Google Drive who swooped in and filled the market gap that Dropbox occupied but Dropbox still exists. Dropbox is still a go-to solutions for staff in businesses that do not have a document sharing solution readily available.
Dropbox offers a competitive market rate for their storage solutions. Charging US $140 per year for 5TB of data storage with 3 user accounts or US $220 for unlimited storage.
Dropbox occupies a niche in the cloud that has become smaller than it used to be but with the exponential growth the Cloud space has experienced there is still room for them in that niche. The main advantage of using Dropbox over other similar solutions is that as a first-player in this market their service is a household name that most users are familiar with. You probably have a Dropbox account your self. They also have a mature technical solution for desktop file management which was their competitive edge in the early days.
The big three in disguise
Microsoft, Google and even Apple offer Cloud storage as a service. This is separate to their IaaS/PaaS service offering for storage and is aimed and the individual as a service integrated with other product offerings. OneDrive, Google Drive and iCloud are most likely services you use today either personally or at work. These services come with a free tier but you can purchase additional storage.
OwnCloud
OwnCloud is an Open Source storage and collaboration platform that puts emphasis on security and encryption. The community version gives you a tool to run your own storage solution but the Online edition offers 500GB of storage for about US $200.
Edge Computing (CDN)
Akamai
Akamai were ahead of their time about 15 years ago when they spotted a need for a distributed network of web page caching for faster content delivery. I tend to think of them as the original CDN. They were very expensive to use and it was only for medium to large enterprise customers to use their service but it was worth it. When the internet was slow they made sure geography was no problem. Today AWS has a service called CloudFront that does this job just as well and costs very little in comparison.
Today Akamai still occupy the same space but refer to their offering a cloud service.
Conclusion
The big three Cloud providers offer a vastness of services and level of both redundancy and security that can not be matched by any other company on earth. These services as a whole are much cheaper than a company could build them on their own. However, not all solutions require that level of service. You do pay for the maturity of the big three platforms in the price of the service and that is where niche services can sometimes offer you a more suitable solution.
